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Julian Barnes

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Salman Rushdie

A literary academic today attacked the "cult of personality" among English novelists, lambasting some as over-rated "show-offs".

Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes are among the writers who come in for criticism in a forthcoming publication by Professor Gabriel Josipovici, What Ever Happened To Modernism?

Describing the authors as "prep-school boys showing off", Professor Josipovici laments the state of the contemporary English novel, saying: "We are in a very fallow period."

In his book, the academic launches an attack on the literary giants, accusing them of being "self-satisfied" and "hollow", the Guardian reports.

Professor Josipovici today told the Standard it was ironic his book had sparked a literary storm for the same ideas he was condemning.

He said: "The book questions the ridiculousness of the cult of personality and that is exactly what has happened. It's become the cult of personality. There are more than 200 pages in the book. The comments have been taken out of context. I don't want to say anything about the individual authors other than to say read the book."

Professor Josipovici, a research professor at Sussex University, has written more than a dozen works of fiction.

In his new book he writes: "Reading Barnes, like reading so many other English writers of his generation — Martin Amis, McEwan — leaves me feeling that I and the world have been made smaller and meaner. The irony which at first made one smile, the precision of language which was at first so satisfying, the cynicism which at first was used only to puncture pretension, in the end come to seem like a terrible constriction, a fear of opening oneself up to the world.

"I wonder, though, where it came from, this petty-bourgeois uptightness, this terror of not being in control, this schoolboy desire to boast and to shock."

A former Wiedenfeld professor of comparative literature at Oxford University, he goes on to claim reading a modern literary giant such as Rushdie feels less cutting-edge than reading Laurence Sterne's 18th-century novel Tristram Shandy.

He adds: "An author like Salman Rushdie takes from Sterne all the tricks without recognising the darkness underneath. You feel Rushdie's just showing off rather than giving a sense of genuine exploration."

He suggests graduates of the University of East Anglia's creative writing course, such as McEwan, produce novels with a "lack of vision and limited horizons".

Professor Josipovici is reported to have told the Guardian it is a "mystery" why these writers had won so many awards.